Ebooks and Libraries: A Stream of Concernsby Meredith Farkas

I really like eBooks, which is something that surprised me when I won my Kindle last Spring in a raffle. In fact, just about every book I’ve read since then has been on my Kindle or occasionally on my husband’s iPad (I greatly prefer reading on the Kindle). When I first assumed I would hate reading ebooks, I’d based it on the experiences I’d had reading books on my computer through academic platforms like NetLibrary and eBrary. Reading on the Kindle is nothing like that – the absence of a glossy backlit screen is key for me. And the consumer ebook market seems to have exploded in just the past six months, even for those who are far from early adopters. When my dad got a Kindle in September I knew eBook readers had arrived. Even at Norwich I’m starting to get inquiries from patrons about whether they can read ebooks from the library on their mobile devices. There’s no doubt at this point: Ebooks do have a real place in the future of reading. Unfortunately, the way most people are using eBooks at this point completely bypasses the library, and this is what publishers and ebook manufacturers seem to want. Why wouldn’t they?

And the options that libraries now have for ebooks (in terms of content, interface, interoperability, etc.) are, by and large, piss-poor. I am deeply concerned about the fact that many libraries are increasing their collections of ebooks to the point where a huge chunk of their collection development purchases are ebooks. They provide a compelling model. In many cases, multiple students can read the same book at once. The books take less time and effort in terms of processing and take up no physical space at all. But the negatives, the uncertainties of where the ebook market is headed, and the current restrictions most ebook vendors have placed on their products often outweigh the benefits. That doesn’t mean we can bury our heads in the sand and ignore this huge trend, but I also agree strongly with Eli Neiburger at the Library Journal eBook Summit that libraries are screwed (watch his presentation from the Summit here and here).

This post is basically a stream of consciousness outline of some of the concerns that have been swirling around in my head regarding eBooks. I am far from an ebook expert. I don’t read contracts from vendors and I don’t know the ins and outs of the ebook market, DRM, first sale doctrine, etc. I’m just someone in charge of collection development for our largest School who realizes how little most librarians know about what we’re getting into with ebooks (me included) and who is really concerned about where things are going. If you want to hear about eBooks from people with deeper knowledge of the subject, here are a few people I can recommend: Sue Polanka, Jason Griffey, Eric Hellman and Tom Peters.

There are differences between eBooks for individuals and eBooks for libraries to lend

Buying a physical book versus checking it out from the library are not radically different processes. Both have very small barriers (leaving the house to get a library book or buy a book at a bookstore vs. waiting at least a day or more to get a book purchased online). Getting an eBook on my kindle is ridiculously simple. Click on the order button and it’s there. Heck, I can even preview part of the first chapter for fee to see if I want to buy it! And for the average person who just wants to read a book and be done with it, they don’t care about it working on other devices, any restrictions on lending, etc. Getting an eBook from a library is often a circuitous and confusing process; so confusing that libraries have to create tutorials on how to do it. This doesn’t even take into account the myriad interoperability issues when patrons want to actually read a library ebook on their mobile/ereader device. And the fact that libraries often can’t get eBook packages/options that provide the content our patrons want (especially in academic libraries). The worst part is that I can’t see this getting better in the future when it makes no financial sense for Amazon, B&N, Sony, etc. to make it easy for libraries to get and provide this content to their patrons. If the e-reader providers largely control the market for eBooks, libraries will be aced out.

What about ILL?

Interlibrary loan is an important part of what we do. Many consortia have cooperative collection development agreements where they will not duplicate collections and can borrow from each other. What does that mean when what they’re buying are ebooks? Only a small number of ebook vendors (actually, Springer is the only one I know of) allow for any sort of ILL, which means that the more our book collections go digital, the less we will be able to loan to other libraries or borrow from other libraries. That libraries are going in this direction without considering the impact on ILL are really shooting ourselves, our patrons, our profession, in the foot. Just try to imagine your library without interlibrary loan. I know I can’t.

Too many platforms, too little interoperability

In a perfect world, we’d have a collection of eBooks that were all accessible through a single easy-to-use, easy-to-search platform. Unfortunately, that doesn’t look like it’ll ever happen. The best we can do is to make our eBook collections findable via our library catalog, but that lacks the sophisticated search functionality of the individual platforms themselves. I teach our distance learners how to search for books in the catalog AND eBrary, even though our catalog contains the eBrary MARC records. Why? Because the search functionality of eBrary is better. eBrary can search the full-text of books and will often pull up a much better results list.

We get a lot of Gale’s literature reference works through Literature Resource Center. However, LRC doesn’t contain all of Gale’s literature reference works, and if you want to subscribe to those, you can’t get it on the same platform as the LRC. For example, we want to get Gale’s Children’s Literature Review since English majors seem to have increasing interest in research YA authors. Given the size of the collection (well over 100 volumes) and the direction that reference collections are going in, it made sense to look into getting it online. The problem is, we can’t get this collection through Literature Resource Center. Instead, we would need to catalog it and hope that users stumble upon it. We teach English students to search MLA International Bibliography and Literature Resource Center. We teach them about our print reference works. We teach students how to find books of criticism on specific works or authors in the catalog. Now, we need to somehow explain that while most of our reference collection lives on the first floor of the library, some of it is online and accessible through the catalog if you know the specific title of the work (since it’s not like you could do a search for Roald Dahl in the catalog and have the Children’s Literature Review pop up). This was difficult enough for me to explain in a blog post for librarians; just imagine me trying to explain all this to a bunch of Freshman in our EN 102 classes!

And how do you browse a shelf of eBooks?

Browsing is still an important part of the discovery experience. Every time I am helping a student find books on a specific topic, I will suggest that they look to the left and right of the books they are specifically looking for on the shelf to see if there’s something that didn’t come up in our search that would be a great fit for their research. There’s nothing like serendipity, and serendipitous browsing is still not replicated well online. And this becomes even more difficult to imagine replicating when you have a mix of ebook collections and print books. The collection becomes even more fragmented, even more difficult to browse.

DRM and crazy rules for “lending”

I always feel embarrassed when I have to explain to our distance learners that they can’t do any of the things they’d like to do with eBrary books. Our distance learners are often on the road for their work. Many are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and have Internet access for very limited periods of time. I even had a student on a submarine who had 1 hour per day to access the Internet and get all of the work that requires an Internet connection done. So when I tell them, no, you can’t download the books; no, you can’t print more than a small portion of any book; no, you can’t read them offline, I feel like a jerk. Why are we providing such a crappy product to our students that doesn’t meet their needs in any way, shape or form?

And of course eBrary says that their DRM is absolutely necessary to protect the copyright holders, but then you have a platform like EBook Library, where users can download books using Adobe Digital Editions where the document will simply expire after a predetermined amount of time. There are ways to protect copyright holders and still provide eBooks in a way that works for most users. From what I’ve seen (which isn’t a lot), eBook Library so far has come the closest to providing the sort of user experience my students need. But, of course, the more platforms you purchase or lease access to books on, the more different rules and restrictions they will have. And patrons won’t understand why you can download this eBook, but not this one, or why this one will let you print, but this other one will stop you at 5 pages.

Then you add in the nightmare that is ensuring that ebooks work on mobile devices and dedicated e-readers. There are different formats, different constraints. Then you bring in the issue of accessibility, which is a huge legal issue that too few librarians think about on a regular basis. And not knowing where the ebook market is going and what devices patrons will own in the future, makes it difficult to make any decisions now. But at the same time, can libraries afford to sit and wait until there’s greater clarity regarding the future of books?

What do we own and what does that mean?

When my library buys 20 physical books, we own those books. Those books don’t disappear unless a patron loses them (in which case we usually recoup our costs) or we choose to remove the book from the collection. We can ILL those books, we can put them on reserve, and there are no further costs for that book (unless it requires rebinding) beyond the initial purchase. But take a look at our eBrary collection. We pay lots of money each year for access to tens of thousands of books but we don’t own anything. We cancel our subscription and those books are gone. Books get added and disappear from our eBrary collection depending on their current deals with publishers, meaning that something a student used for their research two months ago may not actually be in our collection when they are looking to cite something from it.

Then there are eBook collections that libraries have perpetual access to. For those, we usually have to pay a platform fee each year to keep our access to that book. We can’t just mount it on our own servers. Some vendors, like EBook Library allow you to archive your own copy, but I’m not really sure what that means since it’s not like we can then email copies of it to students or just put it up on our server for anyone to download. If EBook Library fails, I’m not sure how we would make those books we “own” accessible. I know that some vendors belong to Portico and that Portico has now opened up a separate eBook preservation initiative, but the majority of eBook vendors we would want to work with are not currently members. I’m not an expert in this area by any stretch of the imagination and I’ve never read over every detail of the contracts we have with these vendors, but I am concerned that some librarians may not be thinking about the long-term preservation of the ebooks they are purchasing.

Patron driven acquisitions is not a magic bullet

I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read recently about patron-driven acquisitions and the vast majority have been entirely positive, raising no concerns whatsoever about the practice. I’m not saying I think it’s a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s the magic bullet that many are making it out to be.

Collection development is a tricky game. It’s not just about building a collection for the people who use it today, but anticipating what people might want in the future. For example, my library had a rather poor Chinese history collection. Then we got a Chinese major, a professor to teach Chinese history, and the possibility of a Chinese studies major starting next year. Suddenly, in one year, I had to put a tremendous amount of my social sciences collection budget towards filling in that area. Right now at Norwich, Latin American history is not a hot area of study, but I still make an effort to buy some of the best works in the area. There has to be a balance struck. Obviously, you are going to spend more on areas that people are studying now, but you have to keep an eye on creating a balance that recognizes that hot areas of study change over time.

We actually did patron-driven acquisitions for our distance learners for a few years. Instead of doing ILL for our students who live all over the world, we purchased whatever they wanted. After two years, I looked at the books that had been purchased in the first year and found that only two of them had circulated more than that first time. We now have large collections of books on Zulu warfare and the military history of Australia because two students were interested in those subjects, but will those ever get used again? It’s highly unlikely. Just because one student is interested in a specific book or topic doesn’t mean that others will be. I’m not saying that purchasing some books that students want makes sense, but having seen what a 100% patron-driven acquisitions model looks like, I don’t think it solves any problems.

Look, I get it. We’re in a tough spot. We’re trying to do more with less. We’re trying to justify continued funding in the face of the fact that such a small proportion of what we buy gets used NOW. But I’m not sure that moving a large portion of our acquisitions budget to patron-driven acquisitions is a responsible decision in the long-run. I do think putting some of a library’s collection budget towards patron-driven acquisitions is an excellent idea and that’s what we’re experimenting with this semester with Ebook Library. But I still feel in my bones that it would do a disservice to the long-term health of the collection to rely solely on the taste of today’s patrons. To me, cooperative collection development is a model for sustainable collection-building that makes much more sense.

I don’t know where ebooks, patron-driven acquisitions, or e-readers are going. When I read posts like Andy Bukhardt’s about the horseless carriage vs. the ebook, I wonder if reading online in the future will not resemble in any way what we do and use for it today. It seriously hurts my brain to even imagine what reading will look like 10-20 years from now. What I do know is that the more I read about ebooks and the future of publishing, the more concerned I get. And the more I talk to librarians about this the more I realize how little many of us think about any of the larger issues (beyond content and perhaps accessibility) when we think about getting eBook collections. I actually saw a forum post in response to my American Libraries column about the Terms of Service regarding Kindle books that they didn’t sign any agreement when they bought a Kindle for their library. Sigh… People with very little understanding of these issues (and I include myself in that group) are making big decisions for libraries. Ebooks can no longer be the realm of knowledge of just a few experts; we ALL need to understand the current issues, keep up with new writing on the subject (from librarians, educators, technologists and the publishing/e-reader/mobile device world), and scan the horizon to gain some sense of where things are going. Otherwise, how can we possibly make collection decisions about these materials? Whether we want to make those decisions or not, they are going to be continuously foisted on us over time. I had a faculty member last semester ask if we could get the Encyclopedia of Associations online instead of in print. Our patrons are going to increasingly come to us with e-readers that they got for the holidays or their birthday, wanting to see what the library is offering that they can read on their shiny new device. Whether we want to face it or not, we owe it to our patrons and the future of our libraries to learn as much as we can about this stuff so that we can make decisions that best serve the patrons and the institution.

Who are your go-to eBook experts? Who would you recommend that others read on the subject? I’ll add those recommendations to the Library Success Wiki.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas is a faculty librarian at Portland Community College in Oregon and an adjunct faculty member at San Jose State University's SLIS program. She is the author of the book “Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication and Community Online” (Information Today, 2007) and writes the monthly column “Technology in Practice” for American Libraries. Meredith was honored in 2014 with the ACRL Instruction Section Innovation Award, in 2008 and 2011 with the WISE Excellence in Online Education Award and in 2009 with the LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. She has been writing the blog Information Wants to be Free since 2004.

56 Comments

Great post, Meredith. I esp. liked that you emphasized online browsing, which is sadly neglected in most ebook discovery systems. So much great research has been done in the last 25 years about the innovative possibilities for online browsing, and so little of it has worked its way into actual online information systems.

I also agree with your call for the ability to download ebooks easily and quickly to portable reading devices, not only dedicated ereaders but also tablets, netbooks, smartphones, etc. This should be top priority for library vendors of ebooks in 2011.

Your point about preservation of ebooks is well-taken, too. (I’m still searching for something in your post to disagree with!) I’ve been wondering if we’re finally to the point where the issues of preservation and access can be dealt with as almost completely different issues. They’re both vitally important, but during the print era they sorta got all jumbled together.

I’m hoping that the entire ereading revolution will awaken collection development and management from its apparent dogmatic slumber. As the June 2010 COSLA report about ebooks and public libraries (http://www.cosla.org/documents/COSLA2270_Report_Final1.pdf) pointed out, public libraries need to re-cultivate the art of collection development. Rather than (or in addition to) providing access to current bestsellers and books published primarily by major firms that receive favorable reviews), we need to develop skills to find and acquire good books from smaller presses and self-publishing efforts, which evidently is the fastest growing area of publishing today. Leaving collection development decisions to ebook aggregators and/or end-users will not result in good, well-balanced collections.

Finally, I agree with you that all librarians need to take the ereading revolution very seriously. If we don’t, in a few short years the perception of libraries by students, professors, and the general public will take a serious turn for the worse.

One blogger outside librarianship about the future of publishing (he rarely mentions libraries) is Mike Shatzkin (http://www.idealog.com/blog/). His posts always seem thoughtful to me, even when I disagree, and he seems to be a publishing insider who speaks his mind.

I love this post, Meredith! It also helped me put a finger on something I hadn’t before: that we’re all doing something about this ebook issue whether we do or don’t purchase/examine/etc. When you say “People with very little understanding of these issues (and I include myself in that group) are making big decisions for libraries” it helped me put together that when one has little understanding of the issues and then *doesn’t* think about ebooks, we’re ceding the territory to the vendors…and that’s just as scary as taking the leap and making a legal mistake. Anyway, thanks for the post!

[...] interesting post by Meredith Farkas, of Information Wants to be Free, on “Ebooks and Libraries.” The post serves as a very good summary of current concerns and issues about ebooks and their [...]

Absolutely. Privacy is a big one as well. There are a lot of other concerns I have about eBooks (and ones I’d have liked to flesh out more), but I felt like the post was already becoming a novella, so I thought better of adding anymore.

Privacy does not seem to be a big concern for so many big Web 2.0 vendors so I’m not surprised that extends to e-reader devices as well.

All very good concerns. Like you, I hadn’t quite expected to love my e-reader as much as I do, but it’s brought home some of the problems in the library/ebook world. In particular, I couldn’t find any really good tutorials (including screenshots but not being video) on putting books from Overdrive onto the Nook. So I wrote one, which has been getting a lot of comments, been borrowed (with my permission because I think it’s needed) and linked by at least a dozen libraries…it’s surprising how much need there was for one. In some cases, the librarians had gotten a little training on it but didn’t have their own Nooks and such so they couldn’t do screenshots and in others they were just having to do their best with Google to help patrons.

And that’s just the usability issue, not collection-development/retention/DRM/all the other good points you raised.

I appreciate this post as well but possibly have a different perspective.

Of course, it is very frustrating that library e-book vendors are not on the cutting edge of dealing with interfaces, privacy, lending, or anything really, involving ebooks. Except, I might argue, that they exist, and have essentially been existing since the mid-90s and scholarly monographs online were the first ebooks, first digitized ones and then new monographs started slowly appearing (in all kinds of weird and horrible formats). I think this is actually one area where libraries did start subscribing to ebooks before there was a real demand. I remember the comments when we first got NetLibrary, about how no one would read them. CDROM books. The whole nine yards. I have felt frustrated since they first started.

But actually, a lot of libraries are shocked by the statistics for ebooks. I know I was. Once we put the MARC records in our catalog we saw consistent use of these materials. Even the really bad ones.

I actually would argue that ebooks are one place where librarians didn’t sit around waiting for everything to be perfect and used a small amount (at the time) of collection funds and tried something new. I am glad some libraries subscribed to collections and tried something new. It would have really been pathetic if in 2010 we were still not buying ebooks (or leasing them) because they aren’t perfect. At least, that is my opinion. I’m not sure Amazon hears us yet, since they show no inclination to lend things for the Kindle. YET people are buying Kindles anyway. So I’m honestly not sure what is going to make Amazon see our excellent point of view. Maybe the authors are the only way in: Cory Doctorow, I think, requires that his books are lend-able. It can happen technically!

That said, I agree with you about patron-driven acquisition, though I would say it may work better in different libraries than yours. The data is important and I’m not sure we have it all yet.

Libraries are different. They belong to the public as does the media within them. I believe you should fight to retain(first regain) control of the ebook digital media in your library and then institute standards.

1. There is no legitimate reason why any book in the library should be encumbered with DRM. Really, no book at all, but especially in a public library. You should fight to regain control of the content.

It seems that Overdrive has a monopoly on providing library content – a job that should be handled by librarians has been outsourced to a private company. I’m not saying you couldn’t set up a separate entity to handle the digital distribution side, it just should also be public, not-for-profit, like the public library itself or an offshoot.

2. Establish your own rules, outside of the publishers jursidiction as to how you will lend. (quantity, days out, number out at a time) don’t impose artificial scarcity but don’t just make it a free-for-all either. Somewhere in the middle.

3. Go with standards. Only support ePub format books. It will take a lot of the maintenance and administration load off of your staff and is an open standard (libraries like open standards). I know there are some readers that can’t do epub natively but there are ways around it if there is no DRM on the book.

I know some will say that without DRM there is no way to ensure the books are returned. But that is already true, even with DRM. In short, laws will need to change.

Personally, I think copyright lasts way too long and none of this would be a problem if we had a reasonable copyright period and libraries only held books that were public domain. If that were true now they would probably only have one shelf per library and most of it would be indecipherable to the common man.

Jen, I agree with you completely that libraries were ahead of patrons in the purchasing of eBooks, but I feel like many of us are not considering all of the issues now when we do purchase collections or individual eBooks. That’s not to say that we should sit on our hands because we don’t know where things are going, but that we should be cognizant of the issues (business, technical, and legal) so that we make the best possible decisions today and lobby for better interfaces, DRM, accessibility, etc.

I wonder if you have heard of project Gutenberg? It is an online project that is digitizing all the books that are in the American public domain. They will download the books for free in many different formats. I also thank you for writing this. i have just received a kindle and I was very annoyed when I realized that i don’t own any of the books on the device. i understand that the fiasco with illegal music downloads are making publishers worried about preserving ebook copyrights but they should give libraries a work around that will at least work in building and be printable.

Great article. What we need is a strong public component (public option, if you will) of all libraries but especially the major research libraries to drive and have a say in the whole digitization effort, as Robert Darnton, Harvard University Libraries Director states. Without this we have not leverage when it comes to dealing with the private forces.

Of course Project Gutenberg and other free ebooks (like the internet Archive) are excellent. But those are typically not recent books. They are all old, out of copyright books.

On a personal note, I won’t get a Kindle until either a book I want is not available any other way or the DRM issues have been somewhat resolved in a more favorable manner. That’s a personal stance I’m taking on this matter, I don’t expect anyone to follow it. I continue to buy books and sometimes even get them used (which I couldn’t do with a Kindle).

Meredith, I full appreciate what you were trying to do with the post. I think posts like these are important to point out to eBook vendors.

Meredith, this is an awesome post. I think librarians everywhere are experiencing similar frustrations and getting the feeling like in Neiberger’s talk that we’re screwed. I can’t say I know everything about e-books either. I know I like to read them on my iPad and they should be easy to access and enjoy. But I think your point about educating ourselves more is a good one. Our decisions during this transitional period between books and e-books is going to be important to our future. That being the case I agree our decisions should be well informed.

One cool project that got started is the Library Renewal project (http://libraryrenewal.org/). The community there is trying to find solutions to some of these e-content problems that we’re facing. It sounds like a cool idea and we need more initiatives like this.

This is one of the more critical issues in the library world today. And this is a very important conversation we should be having.

Remember when you could go into world class academic (and public) libraries and read any book on the shelf? Even if you weren’t a card-carrying member of that “community” the wealth of information was open to you. Ebooks will change that. Sure, our licenses may say that the ebook content is available to onsite visitors, but what about the workstations that you have to get on the network? Chances are, security issues wil mean that those are available only to those with a password. Therefore, our own security measures may also present a barrier to the content, and ultimately, a great blow to readers everywhere.

In response to Jen’s “I actually would argue that ebooks are one place where librarians didn’t sit around waiting for everything to be perfect and used a small amount (at the time) of collection funds and tried something new.”
The problem is that librarians actually did sit around and wait (as usual) for vendors to provide them with very poor solutions because they were too impotent to negotiate directly with publishers, to create consortia to lend ebooks, to fight DRM, to create their own lending/licence conditions, to promote an e-reader model, to produce any technology such as a basic desktop e-reader, to demand open formats etc. Instead 20 years after we knew this was coming, we are now panicking. We have learnt nothing from Apple, Amazon, Google, anyone. Imagine if all the hundreds of thousands of libraries, had got behind an open format and created/bought a particular reader 10 years ago, we could have negotiated anything. That’s too late now. But, what we can do now is not jump into contracts with any vendor in desperation, because we don’t have eBooks in our catalogue and suddenly our users want them. No contract should be signed without the right to own a copy of an eBook and to lend that book to our users for as long as we decide, and that it be provided in ePub format.

I wonder if there can and should be a resource by and for librarians about current news and issues related to ebooks. There are plenty of people writing about it intelligently, like this post, but it’d be great to have a central place to go for the downlow on eMedia as related to the plight of libraries. Anyone know of such a resource, or do we need to build it?

“I teach our distance learners how to search for books in the catalog AND eBrary, even though our catalog contains the eBrary MARC records. Why? Because the search functionality of eBrary is better. eBrary can search the full-text of books and will often pull up a much better results list. ”

YES. There has to be a better way. As a cataloger/metadata librarian I ask myself, every time I add an ebook to our catalog, why am I doing this when this resource is so well indexed somewhere else already? I am swimming in updates, additions, and deletions to packages and I really sympathize with our public services staff and patrons because I know I am not really able to show them everything we have in one place anymore.

Great article Meredith, and interesting comments from many. I’m a high school librarian, looking for ways to integrate digital content in our collection. I am most intrigued by Overdrive’s digital delivery model, and it seems to be (at least for now) the de facto digital content service for public libraries. I like that it works similar to how we’re used to lending: owning individual copies, user-determined loan periods, ePub, etc. Cost, as with most things, is one of the biggest concerns. We still buy titles, hoping they will circulate frequently and justify the investment. And that’s, I think, my biggest challenge: I buy 1000 books on paper and every single student in my building can walk in and sign out any one (or more) of them. I buy 1000 eBooks and only students with dedicated eReaders (except the Kindle) can use them (currently a small minority). I know there’s the argument that you could read them on smartphones, desktops, laptops, iPads, etc. But, as Meredith pointed out, the e-ink technology (not the backlit screens) is what truly makes it an eBook reading experience.

[...] librarians are trying to sort out. Faculty and librarians who read this blog might want to give her essay a quick read. Among the topics covered are Ebooks, patron drive acquisition and how libraries may [...]

The best assessment I have read so far about our future. Thank you! I have been thinking a lot lately too about the browsing issue and how it relates to our electronic offerings. I am ashamed to say that I have not thought at all, until now, about the issue of our “owning” our purchases on Overdrive (and there is no excuse for this as a I am the Finance Director). Also, I swore I would never read a book on my phone (Android) and I recently did and LOVED it. I am hooked now.

Great post – definitely points out some areas of concern. I work in a library that belongs to a large-ish academic library consortium in the Pacific NW – the Orbis-Cascade Alliance (aka Summit). This spring, the alliance is going to be doing a pilot project with YBP & EBL to share ebooks at the consortial level (more here: http://www.orbiscascade.org/index/cms-filesystem-action/collection_development/ddapilotpressrelease.pdf). I don’t know much more about the pilot at the moment, but it will surely be interesting to see what happens with ebooks at the consortial level (I am aware that it doesn’t address the ILL issue, but it’s a step, anyway).

[...] transition is the focus of an interesting article from librarian Meredith Wolfwater talking about the state of e-lending for libraries today. It is a long, but thought-provoking read that shows us how far we have to go to make eBook [...]

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As someone who’s been speaking on Twitter about ebooks and libraries for a while (and generally coming at it from a reader’s advisory/collection development of popular materials point of view), an impression that I got from the Ebook Summit in September was that there seemed to be a fracture in the discussion along the academic and trade (popular publishing) markets. I got tagged to speak on a panel about the topic of ebooks and libraries at the Tools of Change conference next month, and I’m really looking forward to hearing more about the publisher side of the issue. I really do we need to more fully engage in conversations across the industries to see where in the middle we can meet to overcome the current challenges in providing quality collections for our patrons.

Meredith makes a number of accurate observations and I agree with most of her concerns, especially in regard to the platforms available to libraries. However, e-books (it really should be a hyphenated word!) do provide faster service to distance education students than print books. Yes, someone in Iraq may have limited Internet access, but at least an e-book is much more readily available than the overseas delivery of a physical book. Also, I am not happy about licensing as opposed to purchasing, either, but that ship set sail a long time ago with full-text databases. As librarians, we will have to do our best to push publishers to come up with better platforms and purchasing or licensing options, but that’s part of the job.

Meredith….your concerns are spot on..we do have to think about the long range implications. While most of us acknowledge the need to go the e-way, I still feel have this sense that the library doesn’t really own the ebooks (and other online resources) that we purchase…I feel like I am waiting for the day that a vendor recalls or snatches them back and all we’ll have is another dead link.

As more and more of us gravitate to Kindles (I have) and the like we as librarians need to get on board with the issues we face and come up with deinitive standards, policies, and long range planning.

[...] RT @Stevelibs: Ebooks and Libraries: A Stream of Concerns – http://bit.ly/ffNAzv via @Shareaholic A few concerns voiced by a librarian, Meredith Farkas, about ebooks and libraries.Points being covered:- What about ILL?- Too many platforms, too little interoperability- how do you browse a shelf of eBooks?- DRM and crazy rules for “lending”- What do we own and what does that mean?- What do we own and what does that mean? [...]